I just wanted to say first thank you for all the feedback, comments and suggestions. I wanted to clarify a couple of points, since I think folks raise valid questions here that a worthy of a response:

- This blog post doesn't address stuff from BWE 2 and how we plan to respond to the feedback from it, because this post was written and submitted before BWE 2, long before we compiled all the feedback from the BWE. The posts that go up on our blog are usually written weeks/months in advanced and sent over for editing and then posted when there is a downtime where there isn't anything currently scheduled on our blog. However, keep an eye out on TenTonHammer where Jon and I are currently working on answering questions for Lewis Burnell that answer some very BWE 2 specific questions, many of which have been asked in this very thread.

- This blog post was written from the perspective of the content design team and the folks on it who are directly responsible for the production of event, story, and dungeon content in Gw2. Stuff like cash shop, traits, skill progression, etc. are all handled by other teams in the company, and as such really aren't the focus on this article. The focus here is how we develop content specifically at ArenaNet on the Content Design team, and the metrics we use to help track the success of that content specifically, vs. how content is developed for games with subscription models. The cash shop isn't mentioned in the article because quite frankly, we simply don't design content on our team with the intent of the cash shop being needed to do any of it. Our bonus hope from this article was also to help explain why you should fill out those little surveys in the BWE events!

Hope that helps a bit, I know in this time after the BWE everyone is looking for more information, release dates, or wants to talk about stuff directly tied to this BWE. When this blog post was written, that information wasn't currently available, thus the content presented within.

We realize a lot of you are insanely excited at this point and just want more information period that helps get us towards release. We'll absolutely be getting more information out for all of you, but as usual with our development philosophy until we've fully tested and are happy with changes we're making, we don't want to talk about them. Keep an eye on the internets, lots more is coming from us to shed light into aspects that are probably more up the Gw2Guru fans alley, plog bosts like this content one are really intended more for the casual gaming audience to help draw more attention towards the game and its development.

All the best and thanks again for all your comments everyone! (Insert obligatory smile)
-Colin

Finally, we have information on how you can reserve your Guild Wars 1 character name for Guild Wars 2.

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Thus our policy will simply be as follows: to preserve your character name from Guild Wars into Guild Wars 2, you must be an active Guild Wars player (more on that below), and you must create a Guild Wars 2 character with the same name as your Guild Wars character during the Headstart Access period or on launch day.

After launch day (and after we work through support tickets filed on launch day), we’ll free up the millions of unclaimed names for new Guild Wars 2 players to use.

To implement this name reservation system, we need to build a list of the character names of active Guild Wars players that we’ll reserve through launch day. We actually need to build that list a few weeks prior to the launch of Guild Wars 2.

So we’ll use the following very generous definition of active: Guild Wars players will be considered active—thus having their Guild Wars names reserved and available to claim during Headstart Access and on launch day—if they have logged into the game at least once between January 1, 2012 and the day we build the name reservation list.

This news is something that many people have been waiting for and now that we know how it works, you better remember to log in to GW1 if you haven't this year soon and remember to create that special character or 2 (or 5) so you don't lose your character names.